Popular MSNBC host and liberal pundit Joy Reid is in hot water over homophobic content she allegedly posted to an old blog — then apparently covered up. Reid says her old website, The Reid Report, was hacked and that the controversial material was placed there by others, presumably in some sort of roundabout attempt to smear her.

PFLAG isn’t buying it, nor are others. PFLAG is the nation’s “first and largest organization for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) people, their families, and allies.” On Tuesday the organization rescinded its “Straight for Equality in Media” award to be bestowed on the political analyst at the group’s 45th anniversary celebration, two weeks from now.

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In a press release, PFLAG’s national president, Jean Hodges, noted, “When we extended our invitation to Ms. Reid to honor her at our 45th anniversary celebration, we did so knowing about the blog posts from the late 2000s regarding Charlie Crist. We appreciated how she stepped up, took ownership, apologized for them, and did better — this is the behavior and approach we ask of any ally. However, in light of new information, and the ongoing investigation of that information, we must at this time rescind our award to Ms. Reid.”

PFLAG and others have likely been following the events that began unfolding late last year. In December 2017, Reid apologized for “homophobic posts” she’d penned about Charlie Crist, a former governor of Florida, in 2007, 2008, and 2009.

Since then, additional material came to light that appeared on her old blog. Reid claimed that this additional material, which mocks gay people and homosexuality, was placed on her old blog by someone else — that she was hacked, in other words.

The material was uncovered via use of Wayback Machine — a popular and nonprofit internet archiving site that serves as a library of sorts. It enables folks to look at former versions of popular sites as they existed at the time. Think of it as a collection of snapshots of websites, frozen in time.

Folks from the Wayback Machine dispute Reid’s claim of a hack, at least portions of it. In a blog post yesterday, they said Reid’s attorneys had contacted them last December to ask them to remove their archives of blog.reidreport.com because, the attorneys alleged, their archived version contained “fraudulent” posts “inserted into legitimate content.”

Reid’s attorneys, Wayback Machine noted, were unsure at what point the alleged manipulation of content occurred.

One possibility is that the (supposed) hack occurred on the original site, and that Wayback archived the hacked version. Another is that the material was inserted directly onto Wayback’s site somehow.

The Wayback Machine, according to the blog post, “found nothing to indicate tampering or hacking of the Wayback Machine versions. At least some of the examples of allegedly fraudulent posts provided to us had been archived at different dates and by different entities.”

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So unless these same mysterious ne’er-do-wells managed to hack multiple archiving entities on multiple dates, it would seem this alleged “hacking” must have taken place on Reid’s own site.

Wayback Machine declined to remove the archives, but agreed to consider any further evidence Reid or her representatives could provide to support the (flimsy) claims.

And here’s where it gets a little twisted. Though Wayback Machine didn’t remove the archived versions — those containing the homophobic content — they’re still gone from the site today.

Wait … what? Reid’s folks managed to make the material inaccessible.

Without notifying Wayback Machine, they inserted a bit of code on their live blog. The simple code, called a robots.txt exclusion, leveraged Wayback Machine’s automated processes to exclude the material from indexing.

So, in a nutshell, Wayback Machine told Reid’s folks it wouldn’t take down the archived version since it found no evidence the material was manipulated within its own archives. Reid’s folks then changed the code on their live blog to make sure no one could do any further snooping around by way of Wayback Machine’s archived versions.

Michele Blood is a Flemington, New Jersey-based freelance writer and a regular contributor to LifeZette.